Archive for the ‘Workshop’ Category

January Stuff

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Writing

Writing — 6717 words = 2 pts.
Editing — 12,995 words = 2 pts.
Submissions — 3 = 3 pts.
Betaed Novel for Friend — 1 = 1 pt.
TOTAL = 8 pts.

Koala 8

The writing total is pitiful, especially considering how I did October through December. In my own defense, I’ll say that I had TWO laptops in a row get borked out from under me. The first one’s still a doorstop and the second one was only fixed (sort of — it was fixed by turning off the TAP function on the touchpad completely) a few days before the end of the month. Still sucks.

The good news is that the time I spent not writing I spent (among other things) thinking about how the book was going, and I realized that approaching the ending action realistically wasn’t working for me. :P I’m usually all about doing things right, but there’s a volcano involved [cough] and the idea that the boys could just sort of magic an about-to-erupt volcano back into stable peace and quiet was pretty boggling. I’ve done some volcano research for this storyline, and I decided that they were able to prevent things from getting any further, but so far as it’d been stirred up already, it still was, and things were going to proceed apace, with tremors and news bulletins and alerts and some eventual lahars hitting a few small communities. Which is what would happen if Mt. Rainier had a significant but not catastrophic (that is, far short of Mount St. Helens) eruption event. Everyone around here has volcano insurance, and there are signs posted in dangerous areas pointing out volcano escape routes to take in case you have to evacuate; there’s plenty of info on what’d likely happen and what people would do.

The problem is that this doesn’t happen all at once, boom, like someone setting off a bomb. I had some other loose ends to clean up, and I did that, while the characters kept an eye and an ear on the volcano news on TV. But still, the wrap on the characters’ active participation in the eruption was the action climax of the book, and I had several chapters written after that, with at least one or two more to go. All of that was, literally, anti-climax from the POV of the built up action/danger thread of the story, and the longer it got, the more draggy it felt. I could just see readers getting bored and impatient.

So I ripped out almost 10K words and decided to handle it differently. They needed to really wrap up the volcano problem right there, and I came up with a way to get it done without giving the characters a ridiculously huge amount of power. Now I still need to wrap up those other threads ASAP, but at least the volcano thing isn’t draaaaaagging out like it was. Once I’ve written to the end, I need to go back and tweak a couple of things I’ve thought of as I’ve progressed, but that shouldn’t take incredibly long. Then it’s into submission and back to work on the next book, the one I did 50K of for NaNo.

Workshop

I also have to write a short story for my upcoming Anthology Workshop; the assignment for that is due any time now, and I’m looking forward to getting it. This should be fun. :)

I’m doing one of the workshops Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch put on each year, and I’m pretty excited about it. It runs in early March, and I’ll definitely be blogging about it when I get home. For the anthology workshop, we get a theme assignment in advance (like RSN) and we submit a story for it, as if we were submitting to an antho. When we get to the workshop, several professional anthology editors will tell us whether they’d have bought our story and exactly why or why not. We also have an option to write another story and submit it while at the workshop, and get feedback on that one as well.

This kind of info should be gold, seriously. I’ve been getting a lot of “Good story, well written, not buying it, enjoyed reading it, looking forward to seeing more from you” type rejections in the last year or two, and while they’re an order of magnitude better than the “Thank you for thinking of us but this doesn’t meet our needs” type, it’s still frustrating. I feel like I’m standing right on the threshold, and there’s some key thing I’m missing that’s preventing me from stepping over. I’m hoping to get the information I need to take that step when I do the workshop.

Anthology Listings

Thanks to everyone who answered my questions about “Until Filled” anthologies. Taking feedback from folks in the three places I posted that query, I’ve decided that what I’m going to do is include all the Until Filled anthos in the next posting, in just over a week, with notations showing how long each one has been open (or how long I’ve been aware of it — close enough) and which ones are being dropped. Anyone still interested can bookmark the page the antho call is on, but after this month I’m dropping anything that’s been hanging open with no progress posts from the editor in a year or more. That means no update posts, no update edits on the original post, no replies to comments on the original post, for a year. I think that’s more than reasonable, and feedback indicated that most folks who’d sub to an Until Filled antho at all were less likely to sub to one that’d been hanging for a long time. So one more month to let people bookmark what they want, and then I’m going to prune the listings.

If you’re an editor of an Until Filled anthology and I drop your listing because I missed an update post or something similar, feel free to e-mail me at angiebenedetti AT gmail DOT com with a link to your update. As always, final decisions about what to include on the listing are mine, but if I’ve missed something, I want to know about it. (And note that I always check the Until Filled posts when I’m prepping a new post — if there’s no link to your update on that original post, or if it’s buried somewhere hard to spot, maybe that’s a problem. If you want submissions, especially on older projects, make it easy for writers to find your updates.)

Angie

Posted in Anthology Market Listings, Workshop, Writing | No Comments »

I’m Back! WorldCon Part 1

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

WorldCon in Reno was a lot of fun, and one of the best run conventions I’ve attended. I’ve worked almost 50 conventions and conferences, so I can often spot problems from the front of the house. I didn’t spot anything here; even the Masquerade and Hugo Ceremony both started within a few minutes of their scheduled times, which is pretty amazing. :) I got to hang with friends, went to more panels than I usually go to in half a dozen conventions, and generally had a great time.

Jim and I flew in on Tuesday, got our badges, and had the evening free to relax and check out the program schedule before things officially started on Wednesday. We stayed at the Atlantis, the main convention hotel, which is attached to the convention center with a (very very) long skyway. It was quite a hike from our room to the panels and such at the CC, but I was happy not to have to walk outside, where the temperatures were distinctly uncomfortable, especially for someone who’s become acclimated to Seattle weather. Although in contrast with the heat outside, looking out the skyway windows we could see the hills above Reno, and one of them still had snow on it. O_O Wow. Reno itself is about four thousand feet up, so the top of that hill (which is probably a mountain, officially) is probably a mile up or close to it; that must be why the shaded slopes were still snowy. Still, it’s an odd sight in the northern hemisphere in August, especially when one is wishing for more AC.

The first panel I attended was the most useful — Mary Robinette Kowal, who’s a puppeteer and voice actor as well as a writer, did a panel called “Giving an Effective Reading.” It was opposite the Opening Ceremony, but it was a wonderful panel and I’m very glad I went. I thought I had a general idea of reading aloud — I’d done it in school, after all, as I’m sure everyone has — but I was still nervous about my ability to read my own work in front of an audience.

She started with story selection, looking at things like the number of characters, the way the language lends itself to interpretive reading, and making sure your selection is a complete whole, even if it’s a chunk of some larger story. When she got into using the voice like an instrument, Ms. Kowal had us go through a number of exercises, demonstrating different aspects of voice, including things I’d never heard of or thought about, like the placement of your voice — which part of your mouth resonates when you’re speaking. This was very ?? when she first described it, but the results were cool.

The panel was less than an hour long so she sort of rushed through a number of topics, but she has a great collection of posts on reading aloud on her blog. Highly recommended for any writer who might want to read their work to an audience. Hint: Don’t wait till the night before to click through the link. :)

That’s a good wrap for now — more next time. [wave]

Angie

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Workshop — Queues

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I was replying to a comment by Charles on my last post (about the Critique Circle workshop site) and mentioned the queue system. I got into explaining how it all works, but thought others might be interested too.

Stories or chapters you want critiqued get posted to a queue. Each queue is a list of pieces up for critique. How many pieces get put into the new week’s “current” queue depends on a formula based on how many pieces are waiting and how many critiques that queue got last week; the idea is to keep things balanced so pieces move up reasonably fast, but without flooding the current queue so much that the number of critiques per story goes way down.

There are current queues (the pieces up for critique this week) which show when you go right to the queue page; upcoming queues, which is the list of pieces waiting to move into a future current queue; and older queues, which are the archives. The set of public queues include the Newbie Queue, where every new person has to post their first story or chapter, plus a list of genre queues — General, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Women’s/Romance/Chick-Lit, Children’s/YA, Mystery/Suspense/Horror and Erotica.

If you post one of your stories to a queue, the soonest it’ll come up is the next critiquing week, and it might take two or three. You can help it along by doing more critiques on the current stories in that queue, nudging the formula to let more stories out next week, giving yours a better shot at moving up. Your story in particular doesn’t move because you’re critiquing personally, but anyone doing a lot of critiques will make more slots in that queue available next week.

You can also spend more credits (which you accumulate by critiquing) to move your story up, but it takes quite a lot. I was reading the forum and people were talking about spending like 15 or 18 credits to bump their story up to the top of the list, when it only costs 3 to dump it in at the end of the list. I haven’t seen anyone complaining that people who bump their stories are keeping others from progressing normally, though, so I guess they have some sort of mechanism to prevent that.

There are also private queues, which are owned by individuals and are invite-only. A private queue can either let only the owner post and invited members critique, or it can let every member both post and critique. This lets people set up a chosen group of friends to critique their novel or whatever, or a smaller closed workshop group. Members of a private queue can also post to and critique on the public queues, and you can be a member of as many private queues as you want.

I’m probably missing some subtleties or refinements, but I’m pretty sure this is the basics. :)

Angie

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Workshop

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I’ve been missing critiquing recently, so when Stacia Kane mentioned a couple of sites online the other day — one a service to help find crit partners and the other an actual workshop — I checked them out and ended up joining Critique Circle.

It’s only been about a day and a half since I joined, but so far it’s working out well.

The one thing I really liked when I was checking it out was the way it’s organized. You submit a story or a novel chapter to a queue to be critiqued, and a set of stories and chapters becomes available in each queue to be critiqued for a week as currently up for review. (There are also archives where you can choose to critique an older story, or just read to catch up if there’s an interesting Chapter 5 up in the current queue.) You look through what’s up, pick one and write a critique.

There’s no obligation to critique certain stories, or certain people’s stories (although as I look around, there does seem to be some social expectation to give a critique to someone who’s critiqued you, but it’s not a requirement); you can do however many of whichever stories grab you. I’ve always had a hard time in workshops where you’re grouped with four or five people and everyone in the group critiques everyone else’s stories. Inevitably there are stories I’m just not into, and I’m not enthusiastic enough about the some aspect to really enjoy putting three or four or eight hours into dissecting it and making notes on all the parts. Or someone in the group is just not a great writer, but gets offended at criticism, etc. I like being able to choose what I critique. That’s how the RomEx workshop back on GEnie worked, and it was excellent; it’s sort of been my gold standard for workshops ever since, and Critique Circle seems to be hitting it.

I’ve done one critique so far for CC (although it hasn’t been released yet — newbies’ first critiques have to be reviewed by a staffer, which makes sense) and it came out at a little over 7K words, for a story (actually half a story) a little over 3K words. That’s always been fairly standard for me, unless I’m critiquing one of those rare writers whose manuscript is just that clean, which has only happened once or twice. I did an inline critique, where you leave comments under specific paragraphs so it’s very clear to the writer exactly what bit you’re talking about; there are also blocks before and after the story for leaving more general comments. I started the critique in the afternoon, left off when my husband came home (leaving the critique screen up on my computer), then finished the next day. The system logged me off at some point while I was AFK, and when I sat down again and started working, I got a message that the auto-save (which kicks in like every minute) had failed and that I needed to log in. It did not blank the screen, take me to a log-in window, or lose the typing I’d done in the previous minute; I was able to open a new window, log in there, then go back to the critique window and keep working. This is a brilliant system and every site where you have to be logged in to do any kind of work (even if it’s just typing a forum post) should work this way.

CC works on a credit system, where you need a certain number of earned credits (although they start you out with two when you join) to post a story or chapter, and you earn credits by critiquing. Depending on the length of the story you critique and the length of your critique, you can earn between .5 and 1.5 credits for a critique. It takes three credits to post, and more to post another if you already have one in the queue, so the system requires people to critique more than they post. As it works out, looking at the older queues, stories seem to get an average of about half a dozen critiques each, which is pretty awesome. I’ve seen a few that only got two or three (which would still be pretty good for most workshops, not counting the you-WILL-critique-everyone groups; I’ve been in some that only promised one, and sometimes only delivered one) and quite a few have gotten ten or more.

I have to say, though, that most of the critiques are incredibly short. I’ve browsed through some of the archives and for the most part the comments are specific and useful, but still, the average critique length seems to be about four or five hundred words, which…. Well, yeah. Still, if you get six or eight of them, that adds up to quite a lot of feedback.

One thing I’m not crazy about is that the site uses a wierd, square-bracket-based markup system I’ve only seen on one other forum. I’ve gotten used to it for forum posts, but in order to take full advantage of the site features (like getting in-line comments on your story) you need to use this system for your posted stories too. :/ I posted the first chapter of my urban fantasy novel to the workshop yesterday and went through changing the italic text to use [i]italic[/i] markup. There were only a few instances so it wasn’t unbearably annoying, but not for the first time I’m wondering who came up with this system and why they decided they just had to invent something different when HTML is around and most people online know at least the simplest basics, like italics. [sigh] And for a serious writing workshop, editors don’t want the HTML either, much less some odd forum system, so even if they didn’t make you learn something new, you’d still have to go in and change all your mark-ups to post. I’m hoping there’s actually a technical reason why we can’t paste text with inherent italics in, because it’s definitely inconvenient to have to convert everything for posting. Ideally, the workshop should accept the format that editors want to see too, so manuscripts files can go straight back and forth.

There are some neat side features on the site too, though, like a tracking system for your submissions (to markets, not the workshop), a name generator, a reminder system that lets you set up alerts for whatever you want, and a manuscript progress tool, among others. I haven’t tried any of them yet, but it’s cool that the site has a lot of little extras like that; it’ll be fun to poke around and see what’s here and how things work.

At this point I’m generally happy with the site. Everyone I’ve interacted with has been very friendly and helpful. This feels like a good place and I’m looking forward to being here for a long while.

Angie

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